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I'm pretty sure they mean ban the invite tree below the branch of the spammer, not the entire tree that spammer is on. The chances of a false positive are much

I'm pretty sure they mean ban the invite tree below the branch of the spammer, not the entire tree that spammer is on. The chances of a false positive are much lower in the former case than in the latter. Users who actually believe in the site and understand how the mechanism works and appreciate the high snr that they've enjoyed, will be understanding for the most part even if they end up on the wrong side of one of these bans, and have to go through an appeal system to rejoin the site on some other trust tree which is much more closely monitored by its members than the one they were on before. Ensuring that future bans will be highly unlikely.

withinboredom 3y ago
Out of curiousity, how is a scammer that has hundreds of thousands of actual real people under it handled? Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well? Not even talking about scammers, if someone near the root of the tree has a bad day and decides to take it out on the community (or simply gets hacked), it seems you could lose the entire community.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well? Depends on whether you can trust them. If someone at the top of the invite tree gets hacked or starts shitposting, it doesn't really imply anything about the people they invited, they're all probably innocent users. If they turn out to be a spammer though? Then you can't trust anyone they invited. Any false positive should be handled on a case-by-case basis or reinvited by someone else who is trusted and is willing to vouch for them.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    So, what if the root node of the tree starts spamming everyone?
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      If it's that simple cut and dried situation, then you just ban them. Invite trees aren't Merkle trees, you can certainly modify any node arbitrarily without invalidating subordinate relationships.
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        So, you're saying the root nodes have preferential treatment over leaf nodes... interesting. Yeah, def not interested in joining a nepotic org like that. I had other reasons for not joining, but ... interesting. Thanks for answering my questions though. It was insightful.
        ChainOfFools 3y ago
        I don't think you understand how invitation trees work, or how Merkel trees work for that matter, if that's what you drew from my comment, which essentially said nearly the opposite. The graph is the shape of a tree due to the patterns of invitation fanning out, but there is no such thing as a branch that has more priority over others in a structural or modeling sense. The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. Acting like this is some sort of petty fascist power move is not arguing in good faith, it is actually an attempt to escape an argument that you are failing to understand, by changing the subject from how to deal with a certain kind of common social network pathology, to a completely different name calling argument about someone's imaginary nepotistic motivations. It's probably best that you do excuse yourself from such discussions, even if you feel you need to disguise your exit with a juvenile parting shot. Anyway you already advocated for, as you say, a "nepotic" system, by presuming to kick out people - spammers- whose behavior you feel disrupts the environment you're trying to curate for the benefit of people who are there to support it. There's absolutely no pretending you're above the enforcement of value system boundaries, it's only a question of how focused you want them to be, what stable values you want to optimize for in order to create a consistently attractive experience for your users. I use this site far more than reddit, in large part due to the fact that it does encourage its users to identify and punish behavior (through flagging, disliking) that is out of step with the objectives of the site, as outlined in the usage guidelines which everyone implicitly agrees to (try to) follow when posting here. And yet in the public scope reddit is the clear 'winner' if raw traffic metrics are the score. After being on the internet for 20 something years and Usenet for 10 before that, I've had quite enough experience with free for all dumpster fire communities to know that they are not the bastions of high-minded openness that people naively or foolishly believe them to be.

withinboredom 3y ago

Out of curiousity, how is a scammer that has hundreds of thousands of actual real people under it handled? Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well? Not even talking about scammers, if someone near the root of the tree has a bad day and decides to take it out on the community (or simply gets hacked), it seems you could lose the entire community.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
> Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well? Depends on whether you can trust them. If someone at the top of the invite tree gets hacked or starts shitposting, it doesn't really imply anything about the people they invited, they're all probably innocent users. If they turn out to be a spammer though? Then you can't trust anyone they invited. Any false positive should be handled on a case-by-case basis or reinvited by someone else who is trusted and is willing to vouch for them.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  So, what if the root node of the tree starts spamming everyone?
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    If it's that simple cut and dried situation, then you just ban them. Invite trees aren't Merkle trees, you can certainly modify any node arbitrarily without invalidating subordinate relationships.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      So, you're saying the root nodes have preferential treatment over leaf nodes... interesting. Yeah, def not interested in joining a nepotic org like that. I had other reasons for not joining, but ... interesting. Thanks for answering my questions though. It was insightful.
      - ChainOfFools 3y ago
        I don't think you understand how invitation trees work, or how Merkel trees work for that matter, if that's what you drew from my comment, which essentially said nearly the opposite. The graph is the shape of a tree due to the patterns of invitation fanning out, but there is no such thing as a branch that has more priority over others in a structural or modeling sense. The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. Acting like this is some sort of petty fascist power move is not arguing in good faith, it is actually an attempt to escape an argument that you are failing to understand, by changing the subject from how to deal with a certain kind of common social network pathology, to a completely different name calling argument about someone's imaginary nepotistic motivations. It's probably best that you do excuse yourself from such discussions, even if you feel you need to disguise your exit with a juvenile parting shot. Anyway you already advocated for, as you say, a "nepotic" system, by presuming to kick out people - spammers- whose behavior you feel disrupts the environment you're trying to curate for the benefit of people who are there to support it. There's absolutely no pretending you're above the enforcement of value system boundaries, it's only a question of how focused you want them to be, what stable values you want to optimize for in order to create a consistently attractive experience for your users. I use this site far more than reddit, in large part due to the fact that it does encourage its users to identify and punish behavior (through flagging, disliking) that is out of step with the objectives of the site, as outlined in the usage guidelines which everyone implicitly agrees to (try to) follow when posting here. And yet in the public scope reddit is the clear 'winner' if raw traffic metrics are the score. After being on the internet for 20 something years and Usenet for 10 before that, I've had quite enough experience with free for all dumpster fire communities to know that they are not the bastions of high-minded openness that people naively or foolishly believe them to be.